Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [6]
The twelve elevated ticker-tape TV monitors in the busy room were spewing stock symbols and trades comprehensible only to the trained eyes of Exchange professionals.
The day’s volume, if it was only an average Friday, would easily exceed a hundred fifty million shares.
The original forebears, the first Bears and Bulls, had been ferocious negotiators and boardroom masters. Their descendants, however, their mostly thin-blooded heirs, were not particularly adroit at moneychanging.
At 10:57 on Friday morning, “the Bell”—which had once actually been a brass fire bell struck by a rubber mallet, and which still signaled the official beginning of trading at 10:00 sharp, the end of trading at 4:00—went off inside the New York Stock Exchange. “The Bell” sounded with all the shock value of a firework popping in a cathedral.
Absolute silence followed.
Shocked silence.
Then came uncontrollable buzzing; frantic rumor-trading. Almost three minutes of unprecedented confusion and chaos on the Stock Exchange floor.
Finally, there was the deep and resonant voice of the Stock Exchange Manager blaring over the antiquated p.a. system.
“Gentlemen … ladies … the New York Stock Exchange is officially closed…. Please leave the Stock Exchange floor. Please leave the trading floor immediately.This is not a bomb scare. This is an actual emergency! This is a serious police emergency!”
Chapter 5
OUTSIDE THE HEAVY stone and steel entranceway to the Mobil Building on East 42nd Street, a series of personal stretch limousines—Mercedes, Lincolns, Rolls-Royces—were arriving and departing with dramatic haste.
Important-looking men, and a few women, most of them in dark overcoats, hurriedly disembarked from the limousines and entered the building’s familiar Deco lobby.
Upstairs on the forty-second floor, other CEOs and presidents of the major Wall Street banks and brokerage houses were already gathered inside the exclusive Pinnacle Club.
The emergency meeting had commandeered the luxurious main dining room of the private club, which was glowing with crisp white linen, shining silver and crystal set up and never used for lunch.
Several of the dark-suited executives stood dazed and disoriented before floor-to-ceiling nonglare windows, which faced downtown. None of them had ever experienced anything remotely like this, nor had they ever expected to.
The view was a spectacular, if chilling one, down uneven canyons to lower Manhattan, all the way to the pencil pocket of skyscrapers which was the financial center itself.
About halfway, at 14th Street, there were massive police barricades. Police department buses, EMS ambulances, and a paradelike crowd could be seen waiting, watching Wall Street as if they were studying some puzzling work of art in a Midtown museum.
None of this was possible; it was sheer madness.
Every rational mind in the executive dining room had already reached this conclusion privately.
‘They haven’t even bothered to reestablish contact with us. Not since six this morning,” said the Secretary of the Treasury, Walter O’Brien. “What the hell are they up to?”
Standing stiffly among four or five prominent Wall Street executives, George Firth, the Attorney General of the United States, was quietly relighting his pipe. He appeared surprisingly casual and controlled, except that he’d given up smoking more than three years before.
“They certainly were damned clear when it came to stating their deadline. Five minutes past five. Five minutes past or what? What do the bastards want from us?” The Attorney General’s pipe went out in his hand and he relit it with a look of exasperation.
Madness.
What they’d experienced for a decade in terrorist-plagued Europe. But never before in the United States.
A somber businessman named Jerrold Gottlieb from Lehman Brothers held up his wristwatch. “Well, gentlemen, it’s one minute